A flyer for our biggest The Genius Eyes gig, at Nigth and Day Cafe in Manchester.
I have been making and recording music since around 1994.
Back then I had no more to work with than a Marantz cassette recorder’s built-in mic. It didn’t matter much to me at the time, because recording was just a means to hold things in my memory long enough to try and perform them.
At university in Liverpool, I was able to have a little time to blast through live sets live on stage, in my band The Genius Eyes.
I was full of furious angst, a tension that I needed to exorcise, and I was swept up in the rage that I was allowed to make public.
We made 4-track demos too, solely to get more gigs, unbelievably tracking a three-piece band (including drums) entirely on a cassette in a Tascam Portastudio.
When The Genius Eyes went their separate ways in 1999, I felt I had lost a crucial part of my creative stability.
Trying to regain some agency, I started trying to make songs entirely in the box (that box being a Fostex FD-4).
A Tascam like the first multitrack recorder I owned, in the late, 90s.
Next level – my first digital recorder
I finished an EP, called Zogoiby. Looking back it was an uneven, fumbling project, but it was important to me, because in my desperation I had been forced into new waters – of production over live energy – that would keep expanding for me for the next two decades.
I had another live band, Cobrakai Dojo, in my new home in Boston, MA, but my priorities had changed. I wanted something I could hold from the project, so we recorded an EP in a real studio (Wellspring Sound in Acton, MA), a place that, oddly enough, I would later end up working in.
Vintage CobraKai Dojo (2001).
My appetite for that ephemeral energy on stage was sated. In its place, I wanted to be able to craft sounds in recordings. A new friend, Stephen, who had lots of home studio production knowledge to teach me, worked with me to create The Disband, a project where performance and collaborative membership was only a tool amongst many, in our work to produce music without any “real” band behind it.
A project studio I set up with my friend Stephen, to form The Disband.
Stephen taught me so much about studio principles – from compression to mic’ing – things I still use as the basis for lots of my production work, almost 20 years later, and from it came a full album and two EPs.
When The Disband came to an end, my interest in studio production had become an obsession. I ended up doing some freelancing in recording studios in the area, so I could be surrounded by equipment that I could learn about, and also work on (sometimes over nights or weekends when the studio was closed) to make another project, Wring, with a new collaborator – Art.
Art and I, who were the “band” Wring.
Art was truly a musician, where I was now more a producer. We made just one 5 track EP, The Spire. The last track, “Coming Past Song”, was the seed for the longest and still ongoing project. It was a song about the positive potential in a new relationship, rather than its ultimate failure.
The control room at Wellspring Sound, where I did my best to be an audio engineer.
My studio and recording experience growing more and more quickly, I decided to work almost entirely alone within my home studio after Wring came to end, and The Impulse Powers grew from that decision.
Where The Impulse Powers record now.
I have had supporters and intermittent collaborators on some of the band’s 8 albums (most notably my friend Molly, who added real drums and mixing skill to The City Songs EP), but The Impulse Powers is definitely my most “unreal” project, and also my most personal.
I have no real interest in performing music myself at this point, but I will spend hour upon hour working on the intricacies of my production work.
That Night with Golding 